


the queen of chiaroscuro

by signalbeam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Adventure, Corpse Party, Friendship, Gen, In-Laws, Mild Gore, Post-Canon, Troll Cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-03
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-17 17:05:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four years after Vriska's death, her sister and her pale widow go to bury the body. </p><p>Featuring a city of gold, one dragon, and no fewer than two humorous encounters with the L4W.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the guest

**Author's Note:**

> With mumbled apologies to [gogollescent](http://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent), whose inbox has seen things no inbox should.

It’s barely spring when you come home to find Terezi on your couch wrapped up in blankets. According to the calendar, it’s almost human Easter, but when you left this morning, you stepped straight into a puddle of half-frozen slush. Rose is newly recovered from a bout of bronchitis, and you can’t go outside without looking either overly optimistic or out of season. It’s the time of year that makes you want to cry, but only in the sartorial sense. 

“Where’s Rose,” you say immediately. Then: “Where is Dave?” 

“She’s gone out,” Terezi says. Her duffel bag, painted bright red, rests next to your coffee table. You don’t see Dave’s things anywhere. “I brought you a housewarming gift.” She points to the gallon of apple juice on your table. When you sigh, removing your shoes and hanging your coat and unwinding your scarves, she says, “There isn’t much out here, is there.” 

“Sometimes there are ghosts,” you say. “I don’t mind them. They’re nice.” 

“They’re dead, dumbass.” She sounds both bemused and like she wants to laugh. 

“I know that,” you say, unsure why this is objectionable. You take a chair from the living room and set it across from the coffee table, and are about to sit when you spy a stain on the edge of your sleeve. You stand just as she opens her mouth to say something. “Wait a minute,” you say, too late to not seem rude. “I need a change of garments.” 

*

In your room, you shuck out of your clothes, dirtied and roughed. You choose a black, austere shirt with ruffles that Rose bought you a few months ago, then search for a matching skirt to go with it. These days you work for a trollish pharmaceutical company that keeps collections of trollish plants. Your job involves extensive fumigation and machetekind, and, consequentially, considerable amounts of blood and guts. Normally that of the plants you’re taming, but sometimes that of your coworkers, too. 

The last time you saw Terezi, it was one of Rose’s human holidays, towards the end of the human year. Dave and Terezi visited you in the apartment you and Rose are renting in one of the mountainous regions of New York, three hours from New York City and three hours from her home ‘up north,’ and you all exchanged presents and ate takeout and not long after that came down with a case of collective food poisoning. You remember getting drunk, and the frozen sound of the wind slipping under the sliding glass door leading to your balcony and into your apartment, the way it whistled tunelessly into the apartment and found its way under the gaps of your sleeves and dried your skin out terribly. The way Rose bent down to cover her brother and Terezi with a blanket, pity clear as water on her face.

It has always annoyed you that Rose and Terezi are so close. Not because, as Rose would like to believe, you think the slobber and spittle of Terezi’s seductive wiles will capture Rose’s admittedly fickle heart, but because you don’t have any kind of love towards Terezi. You hadn’t minded her so much when you were small, before Vriska launched Tavros off a cliff and all the messy fallout that came after, and even during the game you found her little more than eccentric and sometimes incomprehensible. But these days when you hear her and Rose talking over video chat, you wonder what would happen if you were to strip away the tongue and the stupid costumes from Rose’s eyes, and leave only the knife. Rose, you remember, was so surprised when you told her about Eridan, and to this day she prefers to give you disapproving looks at your dismemberment jokes instead of laughter. But what did she expect from you? You aren’t as forgiving as she is. You prefer to meet murder for murder. 

With that, you decide on a plum-colored skirt with a pale yellow lining the color of the human moon. 

When you come back, Terezi is sniffing at Rose’s picture frames. “Dusty!” she says, and sneezes. 

“We’ve been busy lately.” You’ve been busy, at least. Rose’s job seems to be the same thing as her hobbies: staring at a computer screen, contorting her face into various expressions of distaste, and then falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon and missing a deadline. She sneezes again. You say, apologetic, “I can get the duster.” 

“It’s fine, Kanaya,” she says. “I’ll stop snooping.” 

When she sits back down on the couch, she goes down slowly, as though it pains her. 

“Are you injured?” you say. 

“I flew to New York City and took two buses and a taxi to arrive in this small hamlet in the boondocks,” she says. “My back is killing me.” 

You ask, haltingly, “Are things with Dave all right?” Her teeth gleam. She killed Dave once, you remember, or had him kill himself—the exactitudes of the matter escape you. Later she cried about it. You understood it then, but time has a way of making motive murky. “Then what are you doing here,” you say. You meant to make it sound forceful. You just sound gently puzzled, as though you’ve found a tissue stuck to your heel. 

“Aradia came to visit me,” she said. So, you want to say. Aradia and Terezi have been friends for a long time now. The only extraordinary thing in that statement is that Aradia had taken a break from ferrying dead souls or digging up old skeletons or whatever it is she does these days. Sometimes you catch her on Trollian, but you never have much to talk about. You ask her about Sacsahuaman and the Galapagos or wherever she is today, and she talks about dead things. “She says there’s something we should see down in Pennsylvania.” 

“Where?” 

“It’s the duchy below this one,” she says. “If we leave tonight, we can make it a ‘weekend trip.’ I will even graciously pay for the gas and motel room.” 

“It’s Vriska, isn’t it?” you say, incredulous. You can’t imagine anything else connecting the two of you that would require Aradia’s intervention. “You are kidding me. I refuse. I would’ve thought that you, too, would have cast her aside.” 

She turns the her cane around, the red dragon head searching blindly about the room for its prey. “Vriska asked Aradia to inter her recently discovered corpse with some piece of treasure,” she admits. “I thought you would appreciate going with me. You were her moirail once, or nearly.” 

“What?” Her smile is suggestive and sprightly. “There are better things to do than to relive the past. I have better things to do this weekend, as do you.” Or you think she does. Terezi is studying for the troll bar, which means she’s shoveling down infogrubs like she’s been newly hatched. The news surprised you when you heard. As you understood it, the law had always been a prop for her to channel her murder to deserving targets, nothing so tangible that you could imagine her holing herself up in a corner of a moldy library and ripping through the grubs. Maybe you haven’t been as charitable towards Terezi as you should have. It vexes you that her mere presence can force you to reconsider your impression of her, and you make a note to immediately reset your opinion of her at a later date, preferably when she is no longer in your company. 

“Anyway,” you say, “we saw her in the dream bubbles. She seemed fine then.” You had tried to tell Vriska what a bad moirail she had been, but you didn’t hold it against her any longer because you have grown up, and are now a rainbow drinker, and also dating someone who you don’t want to sock in the jaw—she laughed at you before you even finished saying hello, but it was naive of you to expect better. You miss her. 

“She’s gone now,” she says. Cheerless, despite her smile. Like a ship sinking beneath the water, both ends still visible even as the boards vanish beneath the waves.

“I don’t see the charm in it.” 

“It’s not about the charm,” Terezi says, and this time emphasizes her point by hitting the ground with the end of the cane. A second later your downstairs neighbor smacks his ceiling with a broom in retaliation. “When did anyone call Vriska charming?” 

“She wasn’t always so bad,” you say. Terezi looks at you, amazed. A little embarrassed, you say, “Vriska and I departed on amicable terms, and as far as I can tell, there is no need for me to make the trek. By your own admission, you are only one day away. I am certain you can find your way there, alone.” 

“You’d leave a blind girl to fend for herself in the Pennsylvanian wilderness?” she says. “You’d leave me to be ravished by the highwaytrolls and the looters and the musclebeasts? Kanaya! I thought you’d know better.” 

“There are no musclebeasts—” you begin, but she says, speaking right over you, “I had hoped we wouldn’t have to come to this, but you’ve forced my hand. If you won’t come with me, then I’ll ask Rose to send you. Two sentences and I could have her spill everything you said to her the last time you swilled her fermented juices! One question and she’ll send you off on a little vacation. Is that incredulity I smell off of you, Peppermint?” 

“Merely disbelief,” you say. Rose would never betray you like that! You think. 

“We already know this is going to happen in one of two ways,” she says. “I'll flip this caegar.” You roll your eyes. She hits you across the head with her cane. “Pay attention, Peppermint. Sight-side up, you come with me without complaining. We have a good dinner tonight, try some of Rose’s disgusting wines, and tomorrow evening hop into the car and go to Pennsylvania. Blind-side up, I get Rose to make you do it.” 

“What about the side where you leave,” you say, rubbing your ear. 

“The side where I leave is the one where Rose talks me out of it,” she says. “So your choices are to give into the inevitable or trip over the bloated corpse of your sad, sad attempt to troll Houdini out of my plan.” 

“Well, you’re welcome to try.” 

Terezi flips the caegar at you—it hits you on the nose. “Which side did it land on?” 

Oh, for. “We both know it doesn’t matter what side is facing up,” you say, irked. You didn’t even know they still made caegars these days. Where did she even get this? “Rose will be happy to see you, but I expect that you will return Texas at the end of this weekend without causing further mischief. Rose can even drive you to the airport.” 

“Are you sure about that?” she says. 

“Terezi,” you groan. Your nose throbs. 

“I’m just saying,” Terezi says. “I know the way Rose’s mind works better than you might think. You won’t want to leave me alone with her for too long. We're a health hazard.” Her mouth forms a sharp-pointed ‘V’. 

“I’m going to make tea,” you say. “And when I come back, I expect that you will have finally moved onto a better topic of conversation.” You flip the coin back at her—it spins and spirals, and lands, impossibly, on the flat, gray field of her tongue. 

* 

Four hours later, Rose has folded like a paper jacket that’s recently met a brick. 

“Why not?” she says. “It’ll be fun.” 

“Then _you_ do it,” you say, sweating a little—you can see her bra strap! You have been tricked. 

“Oh, I couldn’t. Terezi said she has something to tell you. Something that absolutely can't wait.” Then she giggles, and says, “Maybe a confession of pale feelings?” 

“Stop it,” you say, dismayed. “Terezi Pyrope would not be able to pacify a human baby. Terezi Pyrope would eat the baby.”

“Most people would, given the chance,” Rose says. 

She gives you the key to one of her cars. The mechanical one and not one of Roxy’s organic ones that bark at other cars and passersby when you’re at a stoplight. “You should probably go tonight, while the sun is still down. You know how weird Terezi looks when she sunburns.” 

“Terezi doesn’t care what she looks like when she sunburns.” 

“I do.” 

“Why?” you say, bewildered. 

“I think she’s pretty attractive.” You pretend to gag. Rose swats your shoulder. “Take the scenic route,” she says. 

“We won’t be able to see anything in the dark,” you say, rapidly seeing that not a single aspect of this trip is going to go your way. “You are actively conspiring to make me miserable.” She kisses you, with tongue. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“Liar,” she says. She squeezes your leg through your skirt, and you realize that, among other things, you are very easy to mollify. 

An hour later, you’ve put on the last of your hair gel. You shoulder your bags and kiss Rose goodbye. Terezi is dozing on your couch. She looks small there, swaddled in her blankets. She had looked small, too, in her dragon cape, the narrow point of her chin dwarfed by the floppy red head on top. 

Since she’s asleep, you figure there can be no harm in examining her cane. It’s always intrigued you, though only distantly, and undead or not, you still love shiny objects. It’s heavy all over, not just the top. You feel for a release, and find it along the smooth, white portion of the shaft. You click it, and a sword pops out from the wrong end. You feel for a second release—there it is, smooth and cool at the tip of your claw. You depress it, and out it comes. The head of the dragon, and the long, sharp body, and the pointed tail. You remember killing Eridan, the way his flesh had gotten caught in the teeth and the slow, sputtering drag through wet veins and fat before the comforting saw across the bone—you feel the steel in your hands, and marvel at how such a slim, thin thing could be so capable. 

You slide the swords back into their sheath. Terezi stirs a moment later, maybe only pretending to have been sleeping. A savage part of you hopes she was surprised by you then, but she does nothing but rub at her gelatinous red eyes, and says, “What are you doing?” 

You say nothing at first. You think, I’ve done nothing wrong—except snoop, and manhandle Terezi’s cane. So you say, “Sorry.” She deserves that much from you, at least. 

“Eh,” she says. “I don’t blame you. It’s a pretty sweet sword.” She runs her fingers along the cane's length. Then, satisfied, she shucks off the blankets, stands up, and slings her bag across her chest. She flips her coin, idly—it comes blind-side up. 

She says, “Can I drive?”


	2. under miles of fire

Just after sunrise, Kanaya pulls over at a motel, and by noon, you’re on the road again. You forget to apply sunblock, and by the time you remember, your nose is peeling. “You should be more cautious,” Kanaya tells you. “No shit, Serlok,” you grumble, and pluck off a bit of your nose. Through the twinges of pain, you smell smooth, worn-out mountains covered in spindly brown things, flat, mushed up leaves, and a lot of colors which used to be green. Kanaya next to you is smooth and gray and deliberately cold. 

From the motel it’s only two hours to Spinneret, Pennsylvania. Dark stone buildings, more troll than human, populate the streets, blocks of color framing frosted glass windows. You’re almost ready to declare it a troll town, but there are too many people awake and about at this hour, shuffling heads-down past you, smelling pink and brown and only a little gray and oranges. The whole town smells of dark dust, dry and unpleasantly like powdered bones. You lick an aging tourist sign, and taste not just the words, but also ash. 

“How is ‘bluh!’ not your natural reaction to most of your daily activities,” Kanaya says, perhaps not aware that no one appreciates her verbalizing her long and tiresome monologues when they’re trying to refresh the lining of their mouths by way of spit. “Given what you are constantly doing with your tongue.” 

“What is wrong with this place?” you say, rubbing your tongue against the back of your hand. You take a long sniff, searching for green. All you get is the smell of someone’s moldy windowpane. 

“I see a coffee shop around the corner.” Kanaya sounds wistful at that. While you were filling up the gas for her, she had picked up two shots of espresso. “Did Aradia tell you where this mythical treasure was?” 

“She said it’s inside a cavern somewhere around here.” 

“What cavern?”

“That's the assignment, you doofus.” You wish she had been more specific, but Aradia’s a clouder at heart. When she can, she enjoys being simultaneously a facilitator and a frustrator, dolling out just enough clues to point you to the correct locale, but not enough to keep you from walking in a slowly widening spiral in search of your target. And at the end of it she will feign total obliviousness to any machinations on her part. ‘Oh, there was a giant ice ogre in that cave that you had to kill by using the power of teamwork? I never knew!’ If you had to make a definitive statement on the kinds of narratives she likes, you’d say happy ones, but with a high body count. 

In the coffee shop you lick the chalk off the blackboard, and Kanaya orders for both of you. The coffee is weak and untasty, and the pastries you get are stale and cover the roof of your mouth in a dry paste. You ask the cashier about any cave systems or caverns, and get nada. 

While you’re there, Kanaya flips through some magazines as you fire up your husktop and do some research. Spinneret, PA: population two thousand, combined elementary-middle school feeding institution and a high school, town revenue generated through coal mining and tree logging industries, five point six square miles of federal nature reserve, bluh bluh. The only thing of interest is that the town was once the site of an old coal seam fire, which had once raged under the earth for six months before being put out. That had been eighty years ago, and still the people talk about it as though it is new. When you tell Kanaya this, she yawns. She complains about the roast of the beans, and blows her nose into a paper napkin. 

*

Finally, you follow your nose to the place where the smoke smells thickest: a large tunnel descending down into the earth, behind a burned down house a mile from the residential part of town. With each step, you crush brittle debris and kick up more ash, so much that it swirls around and behind you like a cape of dust. 

The smoke is thick enough that you’re actually using your cane to tap out your way through the foggy darkness; this, admittedly, is not helping you avoid encountering problems of a more vertical nature. You’ve bumped into two hanging rock formations already, each time knocking bits of rock into the ground. They're softer than you expect, for making your forehead smart so much. 

Kanaya’s glowing again, her steps narrow but quick. The steps sound, to your eyes, dour. Rose had warned you about Kanaya’s sassitude before you left, especially when she’s hungry. You appreciated the warning, although you’ve dealt with worse. But Sollux, you muse, actually had a sense of humor, and is dead enough that it doesn’t really matter whether or not he’s telling you that your ass is flat. Kanaya, by comparison, is dour and a footdragger. Were this a FLARPing game, you’d zap her ass with some well-timed electric shocks, but you’ll have to settle for verbal reprimands. 

“Your reluctance makes me suspect I’m the only one who cares about this quest,” you say. 

“You are,” she says. “I’m only here because you forced Rose to make me come.” 

“I didn’t know she kept you on such a short leash,” you say, and then laugh. The smoke gets into your sinuses, and you cough hard. Of course you know. What you don’t know is what Rose sees in her—no, that’s not true. You know exactly what Rose sees in her. A drunk Rose knows little of discretion. 

“I don’t know why you are doing this, unless you are into senseless self-torment. It’d be better for both of us if we were to leave. Vriska can be buried with anything.” 

That’s true. Vriska’s lucky Aradia even found her body at all, or that Aradia had even decided it’d be worth burying the body of her murderer. When you first heard about Vriska’s body, you had imagined yourself telling Dave about why you were about to zip up to a large, but empty, duchy on the east coast. He wouldn’t have cared—he wouldn’t have really understood why you had to go. His brother had raised him, but you could have left Vriska at any time, if you had just tried a little harder. Maybe. 

“Careful, Maryam,” you say, your mouth dry. “Someone might mistake your words for pale affection.” 

“I’d never.” 

“Good! I wouldn’t want it, anyway. We both remember what happened to your last moirail.” 

She turns to you, puzzled. “Did you,” she says. 

“What?” you say, only vaguely aware that you might have caused offense. Kanaya does well with sudden Vriska bombs, a surprise considering their flaming wreck of a moirallegiance, a sham where Vriska had murdered and lied, and Kanaya did nothing but think about what shade of blue would look best with the bruises mottling on Vriska’s skin. When Vriska had died, Kanaya didn’t care—but she also hasn’t taken a moirail since. A mite unhealthy, you think. Unless… “Are you seeing someone else?” 

“No.” 

“Who is it?” you say, genuinely curious. Rose hadn’t mentioned anything of it. But then again, Rose once tried to auspisticize for you by tying you to a chair. 

“There’s no one,” she says. “There was never anyone.” 

Unconvincing, you think, but feign satisfaction. She makes you walk in front of her, as though she’s afraid what you might see from her face—unaware, perhaps, that you can smell all the different shifts of light emanating from her, no matter where you are standing. 

* 

Some minutes later, the smoke thins out to a faint haze and you emerge into a domed cavern. Kanaya, dumb as a bleatbeast, nearly walks straight in without checking. You grab onto her arm and yank her back—her squawk is ungainly, and so is her stagger back into your arms. If you were in a game, she would’ve been sniped all the way down the hall. You slap her butt and tell her, “Stand up!” When she opts instead to slip on a rock, you prop her up against a wall, and take a long sniff in the cavern. It’s sharp and earthy, and a little dank. One corner smells strongly of manure; otherwise it’s too large and dark for you to make out much more than that without physically walking around yourself. You push the edge of your cane into the back of Kanaya’s calf. “What’s out here?” 

“There is a small pond, with a cluster of extremely improbable ferns and other plants growing about it,” she says, strangely witless about it. “At least one variety of mushroom growing there is known to spray highly effective auspisticism pollen on the unwary. There is the clump of excrement, which I am sure you can smell. Over there is a lumpy pile. Not far from it there is what appears to be a cluster of bones.” The lumpy pile seems to interest her. She trails off midway through an overly long description of skeletons to drift towards it, drawn to it as though by instinct. The sphere of her light suddenly reflects metal back at you; it’s easy for you to find your way to the pile of silver and gold and platinum from there. Has Meenah’s ghost swung by here lately? Probably not! Meenah was far too vain to let this much gold go unshaped for so long. 

“Look for something big and pirate-themed,” you say. Kanaya bends down on one knee, and begins to search. If she seems a little half-hearted, you don’t mention it. You’re done tossing the flaming blame potato: done, getan, finis. You climb on top of the pile, clutching your cane in one hand, and dig through the pile. Your fingers glide over cups, bracelets, skulls, and a gold statue of some British prime minister. You toss it over your shoulder, disgusted. 

“This is an outrageous amount of gold,” Kanaya says, now comfortably seated in a little depression composed almost entirely of goblets. “I wonder what kind of troll would take the troubles to acquire this.” 

“Not even a giant indigoblood would take shits that huge,” you say. “And this pile is too disorganized to be a true troll pile.” And too huge: easily taller than you at its top, and sprawls out from the middle of the cave and all the way to the far wall. Natural instinct would stop at a quarter of this size, even for a troll infected marrow-deep with avarice. Most trolls suffer from some form of it or another, ranging from ‘infected paper cut’ to ‘massive tumor protruding from the back of the head.’ You, personally, prefer chalk, but you’ve never turned down a shiny thing. 

Deep in the muck is what appears to be a pair of gold-plated shorts. You fling them in Kanaya’s direction. Kanaya makes a pained noise. “Sometimes I think about the end of this universe,” she says, holding it in front of her and reflecting golden light back into her face. “Jade tells me that now entropy is the driving force of its end, but clearly she was wrong.” She chucks it behind her. “Who even made these? Not even Vriska would want this.” 

“She’d prefer a sword made of petrified treesap.” The pile, despite your best attempts, is neither yielding extravagant treasures nor becoming any smaller. How sad for a whole heap of gold to be so undistinguished. You give this cavern two mauled yellowbloods out of five. “Maybe there’s more further in.” 

Kanaya holds up a spiky, gold cape, and sighs in despair. 

*

On the other side of the cavern is another tunnel. The walls and ceiling are studded with rough-cut jewels, and the floor is worn smooth, and in some places clawed. Something large and greedy must be ahead, along with better treasures and better dangers. The prospect of this excites you; you know well that the greater the danger, the greater the reward of smug self-satisfaction and cheap mutterings about personal growth. You make Kanaya stop glowing, though you regret your order for nasal-based aesthetic reasons a second later; her glow made you feel like you were standing in the inside of one of Dave’s disco balls. You have fond memories of disco balls, all of them marred by the plain fact that Dave can’t dance and often steps on your toes or accidentally smacks you in the face while he ‘does the Egyptian’ or ‘the pointer chicken thing.’ 

The passage is a short one, and this time you emerge in a place that reeks of fancy gold statues, all of them of primitive human military heroes riding on their hoofbeasts and posing with their ignition-based guns—and more worrying, something foul and ancient, swirling high in the cavern. Weaving between the statues is the tempting scent of another jeweled tunnel. 

“Cover me,” you say. 

You don’t even get the chance to step forward. Something shrieks from the ceiling, and throws itself down—you barely have enough time to launch yourself to the side. You hear its jaws snap, get a whiff of dry mud on scales, claws that barely make a sound as they scrape across the ground, and then get whacked onto the ground, ass-first, by its tail, like a total moron. Kanaya revs her chainsaw, her glow set to full power. Now you can sense it better. The edges of its wide, flat head are faded against the light, its skin is dark and rocky in color, and the space between its scales stinking of burning iron. 

You pop your sword out of the cane and swish it in front of you, mistaking its flinch away from Kanaya to be an attempt for one of your legs. Its limbs scramble with impossible nimbleness as it retreats from Kanaya’s horrible glare, hissing and spitting all the while. It ducks behind one statue, then another, sometimes whipping its long neck to try to take a bite out of her. It’s one of its swats that knocks Kanaya off-balance and into the base of a statue as it runs not towards a tunnel but a wall—up, again, to the ceiling. You hear bits of rock dropping to the ground, its hot iron scent now everywhere. 

“Where’d it go,” she says, as you help her off the statue base. She rubs her horn. “That dragon. Ow!” From the sound of it, she’s chipped it. You wince in sympathetic pain. 

“I move that we change its name,” you say. “I’ve known dragons, and that, Maryam, is no dragon.” 

“I don’t understand. In what universe does it matter what we call it?” 

“The new universe is ruining everything,” you grumble. Troll New York was a million times better than human New York, but it helped that Troll New York had been a whole planet. When you told Dave, he had asked you about whether troll Houston existed. Too many vowels, you told him. He had cried about it, you remember—or was that because in his big recoil of false surprise, he had smashed his head into the nightstand? 

The dragon hisses from somewhere above you. Kanaya revs the chainsaw at it, gears ratcheting up with a toothy whine. 

You slap her hand. “Don’t antagonize it!” 

You’ve barely finished saying that when the air sparks and fire blooms, then blasts past you, so close that bits of your hair and jacket are still glowing even after the fireball hits the floor. A second later, bits of rock from a dangling stalactite drop to the ground. It’s running right to _you_ now, yellow sparks spraying from its nostrils. 

In Sgrub, you would have maybe performed some incredible feat of acrobatic prowess. Now you run like hell, smelling for cover. You find it in a crack in the wall, barely wide enough for you to squeeze in. Kanaya’s fast behind you. A second later, the fireball smashes furious, blinding colors and heat into the rock. Most of it misses you, but you swear you hear Kanaya hiss. Her glowing skin crackles and sizzles a little, then flares back, brighter than ever. 

You’re no closer to the tunnel than you were before. That dumb dragon might not be as smart as any of the dragons you knew— _i.e._ , a vast and venerable collection of majestic winged firebeasts composed entirely of your lusus and her telepathic projections—but it’s smart enough to push you out and away. Kanaya’s noticed the same thing, or you think she has. She puts a hand on your shoulder, and nods to the tunnel. 

Then she says, “We should decapitate it.”

“Kanaya,” you groan. You dig your forehead into the sharp shelf of rock in front of you. A wiggler’s solution to problems, and not even a smart wiggler’s, at that. “Grow up!” 

“It’d be the simplest way,” she says. “What? Don’t roll your eyes at me.” 

“The dragon’s just a distraction,” you say, impatient. “We should move past it and seek the real—”

“A distraction that is going to eat us,” she says. 

“The real treasure is further in,” you say. “I’ve thought of a way we can trick it into collapsing a—ooph!” 

Kanaya thoughtfully pushes you back into the rock before springing out of the hiding spot. A second later, a nearby statue lights up, in glowing red. The sputtering of Kanaya’s chainsaw becomes a fast-moving whine. Fine! Disregard your advice. You can’t say you’re surprised by this, but you’re not one to pass on an opportunity. You sprint as fast as you can towards the tunnel; you’ve barely entered the jewel-encrusted passage when Kanaya’s light goes out. Not long after that, her chainsaw stops spinning. You shift gears from ‘sprint’ to ‘sprint harder!’ No point in worrying, you figure. Kanaya’s a grown bloodsucking fiend who can take care of herself, as she’s so willing to prove to you. 

The other end opens into another open cavern. You’re breathing too hard to make anything out beyond ‘not tunnel’ and ‘dark,’ two things that together tell you jackshit. You can barely hear anything beyond the wheeze of your own gasps. You run your finger along the flat of your sword—it doesn’t actually do anything, but it does make you feel better. 

This chamber’s treasure rests in the middle of the room atop a cluster of rocks worn smooth at the top. At first sniff, it’s the tackiest bottle that might ever exist: diamond body, swanky gold accents, and in its belly, an exact, golden model, or near enough, of Mindfang’s pirate schooner. You’re filled suddenly with a wave of slimy nostalgia for a ship you have only seen in the books, and in the passages Vriska had transcribed and embellished from the diaries. You could always tell when she was adding things. Vriska didn’t have Mindfang’s flourish. And back then, she hadn’t understood the quirks, the mixed 8’s and b’s and f’s and s’s. 

When she was alive, Vriska used a different ship, one she had stolen from another blueblood just three perigees before she blinded you. You had opted out of her naval plans, or argued with her too much for her to want you to be a part of it. She never mastered the part where she needed to have a living crew to succeed at sea, and she didn’t like taking orders from you on the water, especially not orders on how to order. You left her to Eridan and his minuscule naval expertise, and predicted she’d drown sometime between her first and sixth expedition and come back to land. She never understood that you were only playing at pirates and legislacerator—all you wanted was some fun. 

What you had wanted back then was to love her without being disappointed in her, so much that you'd rather have her dead than to deal with yet another one of her corpses. Like an angry lusus you tossed her aside, never realizing how little either of you needed each other, or how darkly connected you were. 

Your regrets are many, or almost many. You take the bottle and stick it under your arm. 

A wave of scorching metal blows in, the air rippling around it like water. It gasps as it moves, staggering from place to place with a drunkard’s gait. Up close, it’s less the size of a castle, and more the size of two trailers in length and width. It’s not as impressive as you hoped it’d be, which isn’t something you’d actually tell a dragon, even if it’s squawking at you like it’s got something stuck in its throat instead of puffing fire. You aim your sword at it, and it swats at you with a paw that sprays blood on you, one toe hacked off with jagged cuts. Your sword nicks your own forearms as you roll to the side, trapped clumsily between your body and your arms, but you have it ready and out the next time it tries to take a chunk out of you. It snaps its teeth, and thrusts its head—miss! You ram your sword into its eye with relish. Blood, black and iridescent as an oil slick, spurts out of its head, further as you bury your sword into the long stem of its optic nerve, then in greater and grosser quantities as you pull it back out. It screams, bashing its head into the ground and heaving wetly as though vomiting. While it has its mouth open, you figure, why not! Stab it again through the roof of that stinky, gummy mouth. Its panicked thrash pulls your sword in a straight line from palate to gum, and then further up. This time it doesn’t miss you; you hear something hit you, and then feel your feet floating off the ground; by the time you think, I better prepare for the landing, your raging headache is telling you that you missed the window for that a long while ago. 

It lumbers over, smoke puffing out of its nostrils. Then light pours out of its open mouth—Kanaya’s chainsaw rumbles—a second later, she emerges from its mouth, and hacks off its whole lower jaw and a good chunk of its neck. 

“You’re late!” you say. You’re about to say more, but the dragon’s death throes knock you to the ground, and send Kanaya’s minty halo smeared against the wall. In a move that will embarrass you later but makes perfect sense now, you repeatedly stand up and are thrown back down. You keep trying until you slip on the blood before even getting onto your knees, and choose to give up and lie there like an undead possum. It staggers up, takes a few steps away from you, and then, without any sense of ceremony, wobbles to its final rest. 

You allow yourself a moment of backpatting before you retrieve your sword from the dragon’s mouth. Kanaya’s been thrown in a pile of rocks, so you go to her and give her a poke. She gurgles something in response. It sounds snide. 

“Ah,” you quip. “Here lies Kanaya Maryam, dead from reckless self-endangerment, and also for refusal to listen to a real Seer who, I should mention, has never managed to kill herself by some extraordinarily stupid suicide mission.” 

“Blurgh,” she replies, her chin wet and bright green with blood. 

You sniff her over, puzzled. From what you can tell, her brief trip in the dragon’s throat-slash-first stomach hasn’t done much to her beyond conferring her a sexily haggard, blood-splattered look, but when you give her another poke, she coughs up worrying globs. She pushes herself up. You bend down to help, and then feel the black claw buried deep in her chest press against your own. 

“Are you,” you say, before remembering that she’s the undead, and one more impressive hole in her will probably turn Rose on. You don’t have a good picture of her face, but she does spit some stuff onto your shoes. Gross as hell. 

“Eerrghh,” she says. She says some other things, too, and finishes it off by coughing. You’re moved not to pity, but a simpler kind of worry. You help her sit down, and her arms come to rest on your shoulders in a bloody, glowing loop. It’s a little inconvenient. You’re trying to figure out exactly how bad her wounds are by some metric other than ‘amount of liquids tossed onto your clothes.’ She keeps pulling you closer. Eventually you’re practically in her lap, twisting around to avoid driving the claw further into her. Her hands have settled like a necklace on your throat. 

“Uh,” you say. Her lips move into a smile. You finger the release of your cane, and the sword jumps, reassuringly, into a palm too weak to close around the hilt.


	3. el dorado

When you wake up, the smoke is even thicker than before, and someone is dragging you across a floor. Your head feels like someone has installed their own personal drum set in there, and is now using it as the baseline to some godawful DJ song. You twist your wrist a little, and Kanaya stops moving. “Are you awake now?” Her voice, despite the smoke and the heat, is watery. It bubbles a little between words. 

You grunt a yes and sit up slowly. This isn’t the first time you’ve woken up to fire or to smoke, or bits of your flesh going sizzle in the heat. It’s a habit of yours. You’re lucky your other habit is surviving it. “What happened to the bottle?” 

“I put it in my sylladex,” Kanaya says. She makes sure to add, “I thought it was very gaudy.” 

You’re grateful, for a little while. Until you remember that Kanaya’s sylladex is literally an infinite maze of things that will never be opened ‘until it’s their time’—fitting for a troll who suffers attacks of ennui unless someone is whispering instructions into her ears. Your headache rings with blood-deprivation and crankiness. “You know how Vriska feels about her bling.” 

“I also took the dragon’s head.” 

“That can’t be sanitary.” 

"That will be good enough, then, won't it?" she says. "We can now leave without stopping for any more pointless sidequests."

"Yes, yes," you say. 

She tilts her head down at you. Her mouth is a circular shadow, winking out against the bright glare of her face. In profile, she has a bizarre, jutting growth sticking a good foot out of her chest. The claw. From the smell of it, she’s tried yanking it out of her own body, but with little success. “The tunnel leading back to the entrance has collapsed,” she says. “I’m not certain where this way leads, but I wasn’t sure where else to go. Maybe you can sense it better than I can. Do we have any hope of making it out of here?” 

“A fire needs a source of oxygen,” you say. “Let’s hope we don’t end up walking into an inferno!” 

“It’s better than staying here,” she says. You’re about to head into the tunnel when she clears her throat. You turn, puzzled. “I need some help,” she says. 

“All this after you couldn’t spare a bit of rainbow drinking strength to actually carry me through these caverns, instead of concussing me by dragging me into every rock you could see?” 

“You try carrying someone when you have a claw through at least three of your ribs,” she says, defensively. “My grip strength is suffering.” 

And that is why you end up sitting on Kanaya while she lies flat on the ground, one hand wrapped around the curved length of the dragon claw, and heel of your palm on her shoulder. When you stare down at her, you feel the need to tell her to close her eyes. Maybe it’s because of Rose, or Rose and Vriska and Dave, or just Dave. The two of you are normally far enough apart that you’d never anticipate knowing how the curve of her torso fits the inside of your knees, or that the most natural place for you to sit is the large, circular depression in her gut. Necessity forces unfortunate things upon you. You give the claw a few experimental tugs, and then tell her, “Brace yourself.” 

In the movies, they always make this part seem so easy. But her body fights you the whole way through, trying to suck the thing in deeper. You lose your grip at least twice, claw squelching as it reenters with gross ease. At one point Kanaya actually reaches over and tries to bite your wrist, and you have to let go of the claw and slap her back down. More animalistic than you would’ve thought! You always thought Rose had been embellishing. You force the last of it out of her, and fall backwards on her legs. Right after that, though, you sit back up and run your fingers along the claw wound, bend down to sniff it. She shoves you off before you can get anything beyond ‘bloody,’ and rolls over onto her side with her back to you. You stand up. Your whole lap, you note with some disgust, is covered in dark green blood. You sniff out a pair of pants and underwear in your sylladex, and strip down. 

“Are you really going to wear tie-dye,” Kanaya says, pulling herself back up using the wall. 

“I see you’re feeling better,” you say, and take a healthy whack at Kanaya’s ankles. She hisses at the sting. You hit her again in the back of the knee, and she bucks. “That’s for charging recklessly into the dragon,” you say. As she gets back up, you hit her shin. “And that,” you say, while she curses and hops up and down, “is for biting me. Now let’s keep moving.” 

*

The slope shifts. You’re no longer plunging deeper into the darkness, but moving up. Around you, the jewel-encrusted tunnels replace glintz for smooth-ground walls, far more austere and suitable for daily use—in short, you have exited the wilderness and hit the suburbs. There is even a railroad, though by both your and Kanaya’s judgment, its ashy wooden planks and steel tracks are primitive even by the humans’ pitiful standards of technological advancement. 

The tunnel remains resolutely single-branched; half the time you’re suffocating, the other half of the time you’re miserable, lightheaded and nose-blind and hot everywhere. Kanaya, at one point, tries to execute a hideous shoosh pap that you intercept with your teeth. Awfully smooth for someone who just fifteen minutes ago tried to make you strip! Water beneath the bridge made from the corpses of soldiers who actually take their shore leave instead of staying on-board. 

There’s a river, just a small trickle when you find it. It widens out, fast and swiftly, into a deep underground lake. The smoke, close to the water, is nearly nothing, but across the lake, raised up on a little gradient so the water runs into the basin, is a city on fire—you smell the furious blaze first, before the water. Once you do, you throw yourself into it, desperate for drink and relief. Kanaya bends down and splashes her face and her hands. 

The city across the lake is made of gold, but more tantalizing is the distinct smell of fresh air, carried down the water. The river must bisect the city, water pouring in from some above-ground source. So all you will have to do, it seems, is to swim your way to safety. You don’t mind the thought of this, but Kanaya gets jittery at the thought of swimming. When you pull her into the water with you, you find out why: she sinks. Thin and hollow as she is, some strange physics plot to send her to the bottom of the lake. 

“This sucks,” you tell her as you apologetically haul her back to dry land. She sniffs at your wrist hungrily. You hit her over the head. “Don’t get fresh!”

“I only need a little,” she tries. “It’ll be a long journey back to the surface.” 

“You may sip from me either when we are back under your hideous sun, or after I’ve died ingloriously from these carcinogenic fires, and not a moment sooner.” 

There are no boats, or at least, no intact boats, on the shore, and if you breathe hard enough you can smell skeletal beings sunk to the bottom of the lake, some horned and some not. White shapes flit in the water aimlessly, dumb to both fire and bodies. You peer into the depths, thinking. 

You remember Eridan, and what Kanaya had done to him: cut in half, like she had cut apart Vriska’s other boyfriend. Of course, Eridan had at one point been Vriska’s boyfriend, too, as had John’s dead self. Between the two of you, you have successfully managed to cause grievous, or nearly so, harm to each one of Vriska’s myriad of suitors. In your case, you had just been fucking around, but in Kanaya’s—you stare at her, jolted by sudden shock as things slot into place. 

So that explains it, then, why there had been no mourning or pale revenging, or pale threats of wasting away, or any of it. She hadn’t been pale for Vriska then—maybe not even ever. What would be worse: if her moirallegiance’s flame had waned redder the worse Vriska became, or if she had woken up one day all hot and bothered at the idea of your terrible, asymmetric girl—or if she had never realized her red affections at all, buried them beneath the hard-worked sediments of self-deceit? 

You turn, sober, over to where Kanaya is wringing her skirt dry on the surface—she drips greenish water onto the dirt, lit from within by a new sun. 

*

So you have no choice, then. You cross the bridge leading to the city where the railway would have once taken workers out to the caves. You can barely breathe. You have to walk through while pressing your own soggy jacket to your face to filter out the air, holding onto Kanaya’s arm so you don’t end up lost in your own scent. 

The city around you, you’re sure, was at one point great and glorious, with wide streets and enormous houses that are only palely echoed in the actual town above. But now it burns, as it must have been burning for the last eighty years at least. Skeletons lay on the streets, clad in gold clothes and accessories—when you stop to sniff one out, you notice that they’re made of gold, too. You have either wandered into Meenah’s flaming paradise, or are just not stupid enough to think that the fire is no deterrent to nabbing wealth. 

The only building not on fire is a temple. It draws your curiosity, inexorably, daring you to walk up its brilliant, golden steps, with its golden dragon guardians frozen in mid-agony. She trails after, intermittently calling out things like, “Has the heat fried your pan” and “I am going to turn around and go without you,” though she doesn’t. Especially not when she reaches the interior of the temple: cool and dark and bare. On Alternia, you had been, like all trolls, an atheist. You believed in power and the absoluteness of death, though admittedly soon the rules of death got weird. Dave, like the rest of his human friends, is as indifferent to the gods as you, though he took you to an enormous church that could fit thousands. It was a tourist attraction, he tells you, staring down at the audience with curiosity. A second later, he began rapping about toupees. This is, you recognize, like one of those churches, though tackier. 

“I don’t like this place,” Kanaya says instantly. “It seems ominous.” 

“It’s where the treasure is,” you say. “Suck it up.” 

“Isn’t a slain dragon head and a bottled ship enough?” 

“It’s a quest, Kanaya,” you reply. “Get in the spirit of things! There’s always more.”

“More,” she says, surprised. She turns her eyes up at the enormous building, far larger on the inside than it could ever be on the outside, not in wonder but in one of her smartass ‘I Curse The Heavens In A Manner That Conveys The Depth Of My Frustrations’ tones, and says, “How much ‘more’ can there be?”

As it turns out, a lot more. The whole temple is a wide-open expanse of cold, barren metal, ceilings that stretch so high that when you turn your head up you only smell two tiny points of light, halls wide enough to fit an imperious battleship. Every room is empty, though they grow smaller the higher you ascend. When you open the final door, you expect it to be an enormous room, twice the size of any other, but it’s normal enough, you think, save for the flaming throne in the middle. A woman sits in the center, cradling a crystal orb in her hand. Everything else in the room, save for her the ball and her hand of bones and desiccated flesh, is gold. 

“A tale against avarice,” Kanaya muses. “Rose once told me about the tale of ‘human Midas,’ who turned everything he touched into gold.” 

“And next will be a tale cautioning excessive obedience to the law,” you say, disgusted. “Human legends have stupid morals.” 

With the fire giving off such wild shoots of yellow and red, you almost miss the lemony eye roll. “I wonder what the story of that orb is,” Kanaya says. 

“Presumably it’s the tale of the troll who went underground to hide some treasure,” you say. “And found among her loot a ball of enormous power or vision and used it to build the city. But then this troll got greedy and turned everything she loved into gold. Or it could be a tale of ‘troll creates underground civilization, but being a lowblood, loses power over it as she ages and then dies stupidly.’ Or ‘troll creates a sweet hideout spot in god-knows-why Pennsylvania, but the orb takes over her mind and she becomes a slave to its shitty vision for the rest of her life.’” You lean on your cane, suddenly exhausted. This must be the ultimate reward. You imagine you’re supposed to take this orb and plate Vriska’s whole tomb with gold, or something equally stupid. “This must be it.” 

“How could it be? It’s a crystal ball. There has never been a crystal ball in our lives that has ever proven to be good.” 

“That’s what makes them worth taking.” 

“This is a distraction,” she says. “This ball is nothing. We could be on our way home, yet you want to squander our time on some cheap trinket?” When you say nothing, she says, in a lower tone, “You are embarking on this journey because you seek forgiveness. Why be distracted at the final moments?” 

“I don’t need forgiveness,” you say, moving towards the orb—she yanks you back by the collar of your shirt, and spins you around. 

“Then you are selfish,” she snaps. “Selfish and unaware of how much harm you do to others with your ‘games’ and ‘quests.’ I didn’t want to come here, and if I had been anyone else, I would be dead right now, and you would have yet another body to add to your corpse pile. If you think you are here for any other reason besides guilt, then you are delusional.”

“Delusional!” you say. Your voice echoes on the walls. You squirm out of her grasp. “I’m the Seer of Mind. There is no delusion here. At least none as bad as your obvious red feelings for your moirail.” 

“I was never red—”

“Let’s look at the evidence, shall we?” You circle her, staying just outside of the line of her glow. “Just before you began the game, you presented her with an offer of flushed affections, and were rejected! Don’t you say otherwise, Kanaya, we both know that her lack of register is good as rejection. She never would have looked at you red. I’m amazed that anyone does!” She takes two steps to you, and you choose to let the light wash over you. You aren’t afraid of her, not her body of bones or her teeth of razors. You could never be afraid of her. But you love the sight of her springs coiling, the way she leans in on the balls of her feet, moves her lips and cheeks across her teeth. There, on the growing tilt to violence, is what interests you most. She’s never been exposed like this before you; you never thought her interesting enough. You won’t cut her open, only squeeze a little. Feel for the dark cancer warping her soul, but not rip it out. You’ve learned that much, at least. “As petty revenge, you cut apart her matesprit and her kismesis—and then she was killed before you could ever force her one way or another.” 

“Do you really think,” she says, “that I—Tavros needed new legs, and Eridan _murdered_ me.” She’s right up to you now, her eyes green and slit with growing anger. “It is barely even coincidental that—”

“Tavros, had he never gotten his legs, never would have died.” 

“We had a robot specialist right there,” she says. “I was the only one who realized Equius could have made himself useful. Something beyond sweating. Tavros was happy with it in the end.” 

“Did you even ask Tavros?” you say. “Or did you only recruit Equius so you would have some measure of plausible deniability? Perhaps our Mr. Nitram would accidentally bleed out from your little impromptu surgery! And perhaps then Vriska would have turned all eight of her lying eyes to you, for once. You’re no better than your murderer, though you may puff yourself with pharisaic self-righteousness. The prosecution accuses you of conspiracy—” Her arm shoots out, and grabs you by the side of the throat. She releases you even before you reach for your cane, and crosses her arms, palms pressed flat on her forearms. You rub your neck. “—conspiracy for murder. You’re lucky that Vriska took his life in the end, or else I would have come looking for your unrepentant ass instead of Vriska’s.” 

She says, unbelievably, “They’re called ‘impromputations,” and then shuts her eyes. She takes a breath, puts the heel of her palm to her forehead, keeps her eyes shut. “You never would have let Vriska go. You never would have let her not be the guilty one.” 

“She was guilty from the start.” 

“I always thought that you should have been her moirail.” She’s opened her eyes again, though she takes two deliberate steps from you. “You were so disappointed after she blinded you. I thought of course that it had to be pale. Your failure to pacify her sufficiently.” 

“Pacify!” you say. What a joke! You, Vriska’s moirail. After you led each other from one body to another. You loved her, but never in a way that would make you want to take her hands in yours, to kiss her ugly, knuckly fingers, to hold her to your chest and stroke her hair. But you suppose a real moirail to Vriska Serket would probably have to chain her to a rock at the bottom of the sea, and whip her occasionally for good measure. She was too much for a person. Too crooked to ever be straightened, even by force. “Disappointed—she blinded me, you dim bulb. She killed Aradia and threw Tavros off a cliff—yes, I should have performed a palm slam to her back and then exchanged fist bumps!” 

“I always assumed that you performed the traditional moirail’s execution of an unpacifiable partner.”

“I’ve told you why I killed her a hundred times, Kanaya, and I won’t say it again—”

“The usual excuses about the timeline and our inevitable dooms—”

“Were you even in the same bubbles that I was in! You saw what would have happened if I had let her go!” You say it in your courtblock voice, a boom that comes more from the troll you will be someday than your current self. A voice so big that you momentarily feel yourself projecting a tealblooded troll in teal and red, fifty sweeps taller and wrapped in an adult’s fine reputation for savagery. You drop your chin to your chest, take a breath, and unclench your fist around the dragon’s head, one finger at a time. 

As it is, you think she’s seen you too many times brought low by misery to be afraid of you in the way you want her to be. She startles, as though you’ve struck her on the still-oozing wound in her chest; but it isn’t enough to cow her to an easier compliance. 

“I will take that orb,” you say. “And then we will go.” 

“You will doom us both.” You groan, and head to the burning throne. “Just take it,” she says. “Then you will see.” 

“Blind,” you say. “Remember?” You take the orb. 

You expect the magic, the feel of it snapping around you like a whip’s crack. The fire immediately jumps onto your sunburnt forearms, spreads fast to your whole body—it’s hot, but no more painful than having a mouse running all over you. You hiss, hands shaking around the ball; it glints, and you smell the surface shifting from glassy to darkly colored. A test of your will! You press your tongue against it, not because you’ll use its power—you’re not stupid—but because you find such blatant attempts to coerce you by appealing to your sentiments cute. The image is tiny and blurry. You have no fucking clue what it could be. 

You feel her, before you smell her. Kanaya pulls at the orb in your hands. You try to crush her toes, but miscalculate where she’s standing. She’s saying, “You’re on fire, don’t be stubborn—”

“Let go of it!” you say, and make another attempt for her toes. This time you get the arches of her foot. She lets go of the orb, swearing. You press it to your face again, nose sniffing for something, some anything. You think you can perceive Karkat in there, and then Dave—or Aradia? Too much gray and too much red. It must be trying to taunt you with flashes of your life and mistakes, you think, and telling you that it will rewrite things for you, just as it made this whole city into gold—maybe even created it to begin with. You can’t imagine what it might give you. You aren’t a materialist, after all. No, you did all you wanted to do: turned Karkat to a leader of a half-murdered group, watched Dave settle into himself as a normal boy. He never cared about justice like you, but he had some concept of it. Never made a toy of it to deceive you into making bodies everywhere you went. 

It must be showing you what Vriska would have been like if you had ever gotten through her miles-thick pan case. You give the orb a shake, as though it’ll play it for you in hi-res if you apply enough force. What is it showing you—Vriska running away to you again, and this time staying—Vriska donning the teal and the red, replacing the red for blue? No, it’d never be that. Then it’s showing you Vriska playing games. Real games, like _Sorry!_ or Battleship, or paper D &D—a Vriska subdued and quiet on the deck of a ship, gazing out to the moons. Vriska hanging in half from her mother’s mouth, Vriska dead in the bottom of a hole. The orb pulses in your hand, image shifting now into blankness. No, no, you won’t let it stop, you need to know what— 

Kanaya hits you so hard that you fall, shoulder-first, onto the ground. You let go of the orb, but it doesn’t drop. Your palms, while you were gazing into the orb, have burned onto the glass. Kanaya catches you by the collar, and then mercilessly peels your hands off from the orb. It drops onto the ground, bouncing as it rolls away. Kanaya holds you for a moment, stares down at your face. “I’m fine,” you say. “I didn’t ask,” she says, face twisting into annoyance. She drops you back onto the ground. Then she startles, eyes now somewhere else. 

The skeleton on the throne has stood up, flesh flying back onto its bones, clothes stitching itself onto it as you breathe. Improbably, the horns are mismatched, one hooked and the other forking into a curve; the clothes are pirate’s garb—you stumble back up to your feet, balance so off that you feel as though you’re falling with every step, and catch the body before it can fall back into the throne. It’s Vriska, undoubtedly. For one terrified moment you think she’ll open her eyes and sneer at you, and you do fall then, straight onto your knees. The body drops out of your arms. It hits the ground with mindless and heavy weight. 

Kanaya, behind you, is throwing the orb onto the ground, picking it up again, throwing it back. She whacks it with her chainsaw, sends it flying to a wall and then bouncing back, a little cracked but little worse than that. Still the body is there. You grab Vriska’s head and pull at the hair, scrape your thumbnail against her brow, and finally slide your hands so you’re cupping her face with your palms. In death, her face is helpless and unsurprised, and sinless as stone.


	4. the permanence she dreamed of

The final stretch of the cave is vertical. You and Terezi scale it, Terezi first, and you with Vriska’s body heavy slung across your shoulders after. Terezi goes ahead of you mostly because her arms are burnt from the tips of her fingers down to her wrists, and if you were to, in an unlikely moment of weakness (highly unlikely, you told Terezi, which only made her insist further) drop the body on her, she’d likely fall and break her neck. Her hands smell good to you, in the way that slightly cooked meat does. You’re hungrier than you could ever imagine being. 

There were bodies piled at the entrance of the shaft, skeletal and white, and there are bodies when you come out of the shaft and into the moonlight, surrounded by trees. You don’t recognize the place. You parked the car near the entrance of the cave, and that had been a fair while from the town itself, and while you’re certain you’re still in Pennsylvania, that’s not saying much. The state seems to stretch on endlessly in every direction, one mile of grass and mountain after another. 

The first thing you do is drop Vriska onto the ground, turn her over, and drink from the corpse. You’ve imagined this meal before, though you had always imagined her being alive. A god, sneering and fearful as she approaches you, her shriveled up, unnecessary heart fluttering as she submits herself to you. In your fantasies, you feel the power she must have felt all her life: you feel certain and sure, and cruel. But you decide, _Well, that’s not me_ and take only what you need. Vriska would have stared up at you, dazed. You don’t remember if you ever speculated on what her blood would taste like. It was never the thing that mattered. 

“Kanaya,” Terezi says, sounding a little faint. Her face is nakedly exhausted, though by the moonlight you can barely make anything of her besides the way she’s pushed her shoulders back, though her head drops down. Her glasses are on the very end of her nose. They, like the rest of her, are darkened by smoke and soot. She’s so dirty that when she moves her thumb along the head of the dragon cane, she both wipes away the dark dust, and leaves a second, fainter trail where her thumb had passed. “Have some respect for the dead, won’t you?” 

“The body was right there,” you point out. “I have been carrying it for the past however many hours, and unless you want to be a donor…” 

“Fine,” she says, and rolls up her sleeve. Then she rolls it back. “You already had your turn at the snack bar! What am I thinking.” 

You sip some more, sling Vriska’s body across your shoulders once more, and start walking. 

*

You reach the highway after four miles of walking. From there, Terezi refuses to go any further. She instead insists that you partaking in the ignoble tradition of ‘hitchhiking,’ which would sound like a bad enough idea if you weren’t also carrying a body with visible neck wounds. Vriska, thankfully, is a good corpse, and has yet to bloat or pool blood in unsightly ways. Maybe it has to do with the nature of its arrival. Magic has never been your ally, but it has its uses. You appreciate it. 

It’s nearly sunrise when the police cruiser pulls over for you. Terezi perks up. 

“Oh,” you say. “Oh, no, no.” 

She makes sure to hunch over her cane and move her gaze off-center of the policeman. “Do I look feeble?” 

“No,” you say, but it’s already too late. The officer’s stepping out of his car. You’d feel sorrier for him if he weren’t so stupid. 

“Can I help you ladies,” he says. “Ooph! Argh! Shit!”

Once Terezi releases him from the chokehold, she removes his radio, takes his keys, and tosses him into the woods. You lay Vriska into the backseat with some resignation. Today, you think with enormous pools of self-pity, is the death of reason. 

* 

By the time you find the car, you apparently have several other police cruisers looking for the officer you knocked out and the car you stole. The radio scanner talks about a pair of strange trolls who recently wandered into town; that gives you a little more encouragement to speed out. 

At the gas station, an hour from the New York state, you call Aradia while Terezi is in the bathroom. She sounds maddeningly perky, even when you accuse her of sending Terezi off on a quest with no real treasure. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “I think you found something.” 

“That’s what I mean,” you say. “You sent us on a wild honkbeast chase. The reward was the very thing you were supposed to already have.” Terezi might defend Aradia with ‘can’t a troll enjoy creating a good story without hearing cries of “manipulator!” and “master mind!”’ but you think this line of defense is held out of self-interest. 

“Oh, that.” The silence isn’t sheepish at all. “Well, I actually do have a body on this side.” 

“Excuse me?” 

“It’s Vriska’s body, from the meteor. Maybe I should throw this one away before you get here? It’ll be weird having two of them.” 

“Maybe you should give one to Jake.” He’ll taxidermy it for you, and you’ll get a free mannequin. Then, shaking your head, you say, “We should keep both of them on hand. Just in case.” 

“I wonder if it’ll upset Terezi,” Aradia says. On the other side she must have shrugged, because now she says, newly blasé, “Oh well. She’ll get over it.” 

*

Aradia tells you to go to the Niagara Falls. You’re there by the early afternoon, and splurge a little on room and board, mostly because you’re tired of sleeping in beds or in tubs of lukewarm water. It’ll look suspicious having her body in the back seat, and Vriska came back too long to fit in the trunk of the car. You know. You’ve tried. Terezi had to knock out the gas station owner. You carry Vriska in with Vriska’s arms spread across your and Terezi’s shoulders, and lurch awkwardly up to your room. 

Because the two of you have spent nearly every waking and unwaking moment together in the past two and a half days, you decide to split up and meet at the hotel shortly before midnight. “Call me if you are going to beat anyone into unconsciousness,” you say, trying awkwardly to pat her shoulder. She gives you a weird look and shrugs you off. It makes you feel clumsy and unwieldy. The wrong tool and the wrong material. You go on a boat tour and are freezing cold the entire time. At one point you might have flickered in an alarming manner when a child riding his father’s shoulders tried to reach for your horns. 

Afterwards you browse for clothes, nearly get tricked into buying a parakeet, and then eventually do settle down for a dinner of rum-soaked grubs cooked on cake. You like cake, especially when it’s made with the blood of a recently deceased young troll. Is this even still legal these days? There is a chance you have wandered into a ‘black market.’ You had to locate the restaurant by smell, after all, and you don’t see a single human in sight. While you’re there, you decide to go the whole mile and request for the rest of the troll, too, and take the legs back in a box for Terezi later. 

You arrive back at the hotel before Terezi, and leave the box near her coon. You take a shower. When you step back out, Terezi is stuffing Vriska’s body into the alcove with the ironing board and microwave. In a way it is like you have walked in on a siblings’ tussle, albeit a tussle where one of them is dead. 

“What are you doing?” you say, disbelieving. 

“What does it look like I’m doing, Kanaya,” she says. “I can’t stand it staring at me all the time.” 

“Her eyes are closed.” 

“How am I supposed to tell!” She manages to beat Vriska all the way back into the closet, but it keeps flopping over at her feet before she can close the curtain. The body, stubbornly beautiful, looks more like a doll than a corpse. Not even a single zit. She was your moirail, a long time ago. The sight of her dead body is sad, but also strangely attractive. 

Terezi sniffs. It’s a horrible sound. You think you might be moved to pity. “Have you been crying?” 

“Shut up, Peppermint,” she says, dragging her forearm across her nose and mouth. “We’re going to be late if you don’t get dressed soon.” 

“You could leave her in the tub,” you say. 

“The body will get moldy.” 

“We’ll be rid of it soon enough.” 

“It wouldn’t feel right.” She yanks Vriska up to the single cot that comes with all troll rooms, presumably for purposes relating to, but not limited to, copulation. Vriska’s mouth has fallen open a little. She pinches it shut. What would you see if you lifted her eyelids—all eight eyes, faded out to dim brown in death, or lit up by ghost light? She pinches Vriska’s nose shut, covers her mouth with a hand; then she smooths back Vriska’s hair, gray fingers vanishing into the tangle. It’s inquisitive, not malicious. She does it like she thinks Vriska might sit up and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ if the seal is complete enough. You’ve never seen her so tender. 

You go fix your hair. Behind your back, Terezi snivels. It doesn’t stop even after you’ve dressed and gelled your hair, which lends an uneasy air to the whole busy process of self-arrangement. Would now be a good time to apologize to her for the way things had gone down in the golden temple, or should you wait until she shuts off the tear spigot by herself? Should you say sorry for saying she’s crying, even though you aren’t sorry for the simple statement of a fact, or should you try to comfort her? You opt for spending nearly fifteen minutes attempting to achieve the optimal pointiness of your hair, but then have to soften it when you get overzealous and end up looking like troll Wolverine. 

When your hair finally looks respectable, Terezi has started crying anew. You take the complimentary box of tissues and pass it over. You’ve developed a routine for stopping Karkat’s sobbing jags (when in doubt, smother with a pillow. He will thank you later), but you’ve never thought you’d find yourself in this situation with Terezi. You used to pray fervently that you’d never find yourself in such a situation; but after what you said to her in the golden temple, you feel as though you owe her more kindness than you gave her. You were too willing to borrow from the worst interpretations of her, just as she had done to you; but that was when you two were rubbed raw from proximity and exhaustion. Coming out of that dark heat, you’ve found not pity or hatred, but instead the more dangerous and ambiguous emotion of friendship. 

She glares at you, embarrassed, and then blows her nose into a tissue. 

“Is this about Vriska?” you say.

“Of course it’s about Vriska,” she says, grabbing Vriska by the hair and pulling so her head lifts off the cot, then lets the head drop down hard enough that it bounces against the stretched out canvas of the cot. A little unwarranted, you think. What did that body do to her? “Did you think”—sniffles—“that I was mourning the death of my lusus?” 

From what you understood, her lusus had never been born, or died young. Terezi grew up an orphan, or just as neatly as one, never responsible for the still-twitching carcasses her lusus brought home, never the recipient of a wordless moth chittering at her when all other trolls were asleep, to draw her to the morning’s yellow light. 

She looks down at her hands, and then puts a limp hand on Vriska’s forehead. 

“Rose thought you were going to ask for my pale quadrant,” you say. 

She guffaws. “ _You_?” 

“What,” you say. Why are you even arguing this point? You don’t want her as a moirail, either! Still, in the face of her laughter, you feel compelled to make the case for your pale desirability. “Many people have wanted me as a moirail.” 

“And all the benefits that come therein,” she says with slicing irony. “Impromputations and a tendency for smothering people into submission when you’re upset the argument isn’t going your way.” 

“How do you feel about eating troll legs,” you say. You take the takeout box and put it by the side of the cot. Terezi pops the box open, lowers her head, and breathes in. 

“Illegal,” she says, admiring. “Where did you get these?” 

“I’ll take you there after.” 

“I’d kiss you if you wouldn’t use it as an excuse to suck me dry,” she says, and sinks her teeth into the leg. She finishes it off with admirable speed and then wipes her fingers on Vriska’s lapels. You don’t say anything. It’s red on dark blue, and the funeral will be at night. Who will be able to tell? Certainly not you. You have the eyes of a hungry owl with excellent color-vision. With sticky fingers, she reaches out and holds your hand. “She loved you,” she says, with definitive warmth. “She’d talk my ear off about how you were such a ‘nag’ and a ‘fuss’ and a ‘hot pale catch’ during campaigns. I had to download an autoblocker.” 

If she had said this in Vriska’s presence, Vriska undoubtedly would have reared up and protested or embellished with lies (or more charitably, exaggerations). You had liked that about her when you were pale for her. When you were courting Vriska, you offered her costumes, so many costumes, and lipstick and she sent you bodies, at first. When that failed to move you, she sent you pictures of her messy room. You remember pressing the pictures to your chest, and the unsettling feeling of pale emotion sloshing from chamber to chamber of your heart. 

“I never knew,” you say. 

“You’re only saying that, you schmuck,” she says. She stares at you. She is waiting for you to reciprocate the Vriska-tale swapping, you realize. You begin to sweat minutely. 

You can’t remember anything. You were the one who made Terezi’s Redglare costume, you remember that much. You made it and delivered it and got a snarky Trollian conversation where she laughed at the idea of Vriska ever quadranting with anyone besides a hole in the wall. For weeks afterwards, Vriska crowed about how dum8 Terezi looked in it, cooed about how badass she looked in comparison; told you that you were such a loser for spending so much time on it. But aside from that, your relationship with Vriska had barely involved Terezi at all. What did Vriska do with Terezi besides hunt, and then roll around in a pile of treasures and corpses while laughing into one another’s ears? Nothing Vriska ever showed you. You sweat some more. 

“She,” you say, because you know you must say something, “was very sorry about what she did. In her own way.” You think this is true. Vriska had never said this outright, and it was so long ago. “She once told me that she wished she could have done it otherwise. With what she did to Tavros, and Aradia, and Sollux.” You could continue listing names for days if you wanted to, but you choose to stop there. “She said,” you say, and then stop, think it through. Would it be better to tell her that Vriska was utterly corrupt and irredeemable to make her death a just one, or to tell her that Terezi’s attempts to shout Vriska into goodness had some effect, no matter how minuscule? Vriska had been very sorry, of course. But she had been sorry about all the wrong things, and for all the wrong reasons, contrition delivered with swagger and demand. She might have been sorry on occasion, but it had never moved her to regret, or sorrow. And certainly nothing close to redemption. 

“She wasn’t your fault,” you say, and Terezi sags, as though you’ve knocked over her core of defiance. You hold onto her hand a little tighter, though it sticks and sweats. “She couldn’t help herself,” you continue, and Terezi's gaze becomes contemptuous. You try, in an attempt to rescue yourself from your headlong jump into conversational quicksand, “You couldn’t have saved her, even if you had wanted to—” 

“I didn’t want to,” she says. “I didn’t want to _save_ her.” 

But it’s a mystery what else she could have done. 

*

“The funny thing is,” Terezi says, “is that I didn’t want to save her.” 

“I know,” you say. “You’ve told me that six times now.” 

You’re on your way to the Falls now, after driving the car off to the woods and then going on a footpath. Vriska’s on your back, wrapped up in shredded bed sheets. You’re walking towards the sound of rushing water, you can hear that much. Terezi keeps telling you that you’re close; you suppose she thinks in relative terms after that cave. 

“Hush,” Terezi says. “I’m trying to have a ‘moment’ here.” 

“You sound like Rose—ow!” She’s kicked you! 

“Do you do anything else with her besides have wild sexual exploits?” she says. “Don’t answer that! Aradia will overhear her. The trauma will be too great.” 

“Sometimes I put on a wizard hat.” 

“Just stop,” she says, and then nods on ahead. Past the last of the trees is Aradia standing by a boat. She’s wearing her god tier robes, but at least there are no color clashes. A little too matchy for your tastes. Needs more contrast. Maybe a complementary color. But: she doesn’t clash. You will take what you can get. 

“Hi guys,” she says, waving. “You’ve brought the body? Good, good.” 

“What are you planning to do?” Terezi says suspiciously. She puts a steady hand on Vriska’s back. Of course, that is relayed onto your own back. You would have made Terezi lug the body if she weren’t so short. 

“Don’t worry,” Aradia says. “I asked Vriska and she said she definitely wanted a troll Viking funeral. Put the body in the boat.” 

You do. It’s a barren little boat made of wood and stinking of gasoline. There are little rockets—fireworks?—stuffed in the boat, too. You touch her hair, pry out the treasures from your sylladex and drop it all in: the body, the boat in the bottle, the dragon’s head. 

“Are there flowers?” Terezi says, sniffing around the grounds. 

“They’d all be going up in flames. I thought it’d be a waste.” 

“At least one would be fair.” 

“You really have gotten sentimental,” Aradia says, and claps Terezi on the back. “I can find a flower! Or we can just sprinkle some grass.” 

“I like grass,” you say. Terezi sinks to her knees, and feels the ground with her hands. She snatches a cluster of small, purple flowers from the earth, and brings them up to her face. “Don’t lick it,” you tell her. She does so anyway. 

“These will do,” she says. She puts them in Vriska’s hair. 

Aradia pulls out a box of matches. “I heard that you’re supposed to say things in funerals,” she says. “I don’t really have anything because I talk to Vriska all the time, but maybe one of you will want to give her some parting words?” 

You shrug, having nothing to say. In the moonlight, Terezi looks stark and singular, and cold. She’s forgotten a coat. You shrug off your coat and drape it over her shoulders. It engulfs her, swelling around her body like a cape; but she turns to you and smiles a little, before holding a hand out. You think for a moment that she’s asking for your hand. Aradia hands her the matches instead. 

“You know what,” Terezi says. “I nearly died more times in the last two days than I have in the last sweep. Screw this. She should be grateful that I’m even going this far.” She strikes a match. 

“Wait!” you say. Terezi looks up, eyes wide over the rim of her glasses. “First you need to push the boat out onto the water.”

It takes both you and Aradia to move it into the murky, white-streaked water. Terezi tosses the match into the boat, and it lights yellow, burning without smoke. The boat, carried by the current, moves fast to the edge of the fall, and drops presumably down to the rocks—or else to the center of the earth, where she will burn for all time. You hear, in the near distance, the first of the fireworks going off, and spy the sparking cerulean glow, then the white, then the green, and then silence. 

Aradia whispers into your ear, “Just tell me what you want to do with the second body.” When you look over your shoulder, she’s gone. Terezi’s bent over on her cane, breathing with great labor. You put a hand on her shoulder, and she jerks for a moment. You spot a moment of genuine surprise, and are moved to guilt. 

“‘I nearly died,’” you say, mimicking the way Terezi’s voice had cracked. 

Oh, shut up. What would you have said?” 

“‘Good riddance?’” 

She strikes you lightly on the ankle. “I never wanted her gone,” she says. “Did you?” 

“Yes?” 

“Oh, Kanaya,” she says. “You dummy.” 

And so you stand there, staring at the drop where the boat had vanished, until Terezi hears the police sirens. You and Terezi run back to the car. You imagine Vriska’s beautiful body alight in the center of the basin the Falls empty out to, fire rising up to lick at the stone walls and lashing wild at anything that dares come near. Surely by now the fire has been extinguished by the dark, indifferent waters; but the warmth still licks your fingers as you and Terezi plunge through the woods. The heat that flares piteously against the midnight, and the dark that comes after.


	5. epilogue

You and Kanaya get arrested as you come out of the woods. Your crimes, in summary, are fairly basic: littering and setting off fireworks within the town. They take you to the station anyway. 

“Should we kill them?” you muse to Kanaya as they stuff the two of you into the back of a car. She gives you a look like she thinks you’re crazy, but admittedly, it's not so different from how she normally looks at you. They don’t arrest you. Instead they put you in an interrogation room, separately, presumably to intimidate you into making a false confession. The police station smells like it’s straight out of the troll Nixon era: pine walls sprinkled lightly with parsley pattern, pine scent, and carpet the smell of moss. You can smell black dots high up in the corners of the room. Cameras. You smile up at them. 

An officer comes in. The first thing you say is, “I’m my own lawyer! Ask me questions.” 

“You aren’t under arrest, hon,” he says. “But you are banned from the Niagara Falls. Both on this side and from Canada.” 

Well, that’s not what you expected. 

“Your friend’s paying for the fines,” the officer says. “If I were you, I’d thank her. That’s a fair amount of money she’s paid to indulge you.” 

“Oh, really?” you say, a little disappointed. The troll bar likes it when their legislacerators get in tussles with the human law. They think it shows good character. Now that you’ve gotten the whole Vriska matter sorted out, you feel better than you have since you left Texas for New York. Your impending bar exam looms over you anew, like the glinting blade of a guillotine. The guillotine you refer to now is metaphorical, of course, but there is an actual guillotine at the exam. There’s a whole section dedicated to sabotage and evidence forging. You get bonus points for swapping an evidence head with a fresher head. 

The officer takes you to the front desk, where Kanaya is waiting for you. She’s bent over the counter signing something, but when she sees you, you smell her white teeth and breath, bloody as fresh marrow. 

“Your car is out in the back lot,” the officer is saying, while you have a brilliant idea. “You can be on your way just as soon as your friend reads you the—”

“It’s fine,” you say, picking up a form and running your tongue over it. The officer and the fellow at the desk make a strange choking noise, and then some more when you sign, albeit badly. Your hands are still a little crispy. 

“I wish you would have just let me read it,” Kanaya says. 

“They’ll get over it,” you say. The person handling the forms is picking yours up by pinching a dry edge. You do your best to not laugh, but it’s difficult. 

Kanaya puts a hand on your shoulder. “Shall we go?” 

“I wish we could have at least gotten out of this with a misdemeanor,” you say. “Corrupt cops accepting exorbitant bribes to keep their town afloat, instead of arresting potential psychopaths? Human justice makes me sad. We’re regular criminals! I assaulted a police officer in Pennsylvania.” 

“Don’t test your luck,” the officer warns you. Kanaya gives you a little shove, but makes sure to steady you with one hand pressed just below your shoulder blade. 

* 

What you’ll remember most from this journey, you think, will be the magic of Vriska’s body materializing, and the way it had made you feel: like you were split open by one of Vriska’s swords, like a fruit or a grub in a deep-fried cocoon. You never expected to see her again. You missed her before for what she represented: your mistakes, your follies, your past of corpses, your inability to stop her at any point. But her body, solid and there, made you remember how well she knew you. Grotesquely dumb as she was, she was like your second self. Maybe that was what made it so easy to kill her in the end. The two of you tangled together until you couldn't tell the difference between cutting off a limb and killing a person. You never know what you have until you’ve made righteous shish-kebab out of it and shack it up with yet another guy that you’ve killed that one time. 

One thing is for sure: you are definitely not going to remember single minute of sitting in this car. 

It’s early morning when Kanaya pulls over at a diner. She orders some meat and you get waffles with whipped cream and every strawberry they have. 

“Rose wanted to get married at the Niagara Falls,” Kanaya says. 

“No she didn’t,” you say. You’ve had joking conversations with Rose about this before, but it makes you feel a little queasy to imagine her and Kanaya discussing this, too. Rose has threatened to make you her ‘bridesmaid.’ You hadn’t thought she was serious. Shows what you know. “She thinks it’s a ‘tourist trap.’”

“Oh.” 

Kanaya’s going to start talking about what you owe her now, you imagine, and slurp some whipped cream into your mouth with your tongue. 

“You were right,” she says, sounding a little pained to admit this. “About what I wanted from Vriska.”

“Okay,” you say. “I forgive you. You forgive me. After this we are going to have a pale handholding session that causes the universe to curdle in delight! Are we done yet?” 

“Why do you always do this?” Kanaya says, stabbing the steak a few times with her fork. “It is like every time I put out my hand for a perfectly reasonable sass grab, you instead slap it down and try to break my finger. You would think that after the fifth person I watched you render unconscious, you would realize my good intent and sincere friendship.”

“Kanaya, do you really want us to kiss each other on the cheek, hug, and have a little jam in the back seat of your car?” 

She stinks of offended pride, but says, “You have a point.” 

“Exactly. I hate smothering.” You lick at the whipped cream around the waffle and any strawberries that might have fallen off the top. “Maybe after I’ve passed my bar exam I can make another visit. We can do something fun together. Let’s get arrested again.” 

“Doing what?” 

“A fake murder. I stab you, you fall over and feign death. Later we can stage a jailbreak and beat our way out of the police station. We can spend a few days making the plan and then do the whole thing over two days in some small town in Iowa.” 

“That sounds,” she begins, and then says, puzzled, “fun?” 

“I always knew you had it in you.” 

Her black mouth extends and turns up. She puts a hand on yours. “I’m glad you took me with you,” she says. “Even if you are dragging me into criminal enterprises.” She withdraws her hand a moment later—on impulse, you catch it before she can pick up her knife. Her eyes are wide and shapely in her shock. You can smell her eyelashes unsticking from one another, parting to reveal the lemon of her sclera, the blackness of her pupils. 

“Do you know why I asked you to come, and not Dave?”

“Because he was busy?” 

“You dummy. I never even thought about asking him. Or Rose.” 

She turns her hand over so the blue-tinged morning light falls on her palm. She curls her hand around the steel fork, like she’s thinking, then releases it, and covers your hand with hers. A veritable handpile. “Okay,” she says. “Thank you.” 

You pull back, in fear of coming off as too friendly. And your fears are springing to life, because Kanaya is reaching to you and wiping the whipped cream from your cheek with a paper napkin—the paper coarse and rough against your skin, though her touch is a gentle one. She strokes your cheek before she pulls away. 

When you finish eating, she lets you pay. You exit the diner, and as she starts the car, you think: she knows a part of you better than any other person on this planet, and the best part is that she doesn’t even know it. The sun, at its strange rising angle, casts its vanilla light on the windshield and the car’s dash. 

“What?” she says. “Do you want me to start glowing?” 

“I can’t be held responsible for the direction of my eyeballs,” you say. “I’m oblivious to them, because of my tragic affliction.” 

“Do you think we could go to Canada?” Kanaya says, steering the car towards the sun. “Or to Lake Superior.” 

“You’re weird as hell.” 

“Well, excuse me,” she says. “I was only making suggestions.” 

“We can take turns deciding,” you say. “You first, since I was the one who took us to Pennsylvania. What a shitty trip.” 

“Alberta it is.” 

And so that is what and where it will be: the peculiar beginning of your tender friendship together, surrounded by wheat fields and splattered in green blood. You watch the sun as it falls to Kanaya’s window: steady, and then blurring into repeating white circles as the car shifts onto the highway; and for the first time in a while, feel content. 


End file.
